The Prevention Research Center: Parenting Among Women Who Are Opioid Users (PWO Center) has been instituted to improve the well-being of individuals, families, and communities affected by the opioid crisis through a focus on behavioral and neurocognitive systems that are underlying mechanisms common to both addiction issues and parenting challenges. These efforts span the translational research cycle, from basic science mechanisms to intervention trials to working with stakeholders to understand how best to scale-up effective interventions into real-world policy and practice settings. This diversity supplement application is embedded within Research Project 1 of the PWO Center, which involves the novel application of an evidenced-based parenting intervention, Filming Interactions to Nurture Development (FIND), to enhance the responsive caregiving of opioid-using mothers raising infants and/or young children. Pilot studies with high-risk caregivers suggest that FIND increases responsiveness skills and decreases intrusive parenting. While caregivers with high-adversity backgrounds historically have been observed to show differential (and often lower) responses to these caregiver-based interventions, preliminary data suggests that caregivers with high levels of self-reported adversity who participated in FIND reported decreased caregiver stress and increased psychological involvement with their child, demonstrating that these caregivers may in fact benefit the most. Pilot data also demonstrated positive changes in parenting identity after participating in FIND. The cognitive effort necessary for responsive parenting requires the use of self-regulation, a process that relies upon the dynamic valuation of available behavioral choices. New theories emphasize the role of identity in that valuation process, recognizing that identity-relevant choices confer greater subjective value. Thus, interventions that establish a link between targeted behavioral outcomes and participants? positive self-concept will have greater success in improving self-regulation and goal-directed behavior. The research proposed in this diversity supplement has two aims.
Aim one will examine the change in parental self-concept before and after participating in FIND. Neural and behavioral data from a Parenting Self-Evaluation Task will be used to test the degree to which FIND changes the way caregivers evaluate themselves as either developmentally supportive or unsupportive.
Aim two will explore the moderating roles of adverse exposures in predicting intervention success. In addition to examining the relation between types of adverse experiences and parenting identity at baseline, this project will tease apart the dimensionality of adverse experiences to predict with greater precision the effects of the intervention through change in parenting self-concept and positive identity.
This research proposed in this diversity supplement training award seeks to understand the role of parenting identity in improved parenting behaviors for mothers who use opioids. Specifically, it will test whether improvements in parenting self-evaluation and/or self-concept serve as one of the mechanisms through which a video-based intervention increases responsive parenting, and whether that relationship is differentially influenced by caregivers? adverse exposures and sociodemographic risk.
